“Through your eyes” is a novel by the Danish author Peter Høeg, it is a Meta thriller that examines a future where we can use MRI and brain Scanners to visualize other people’s feelings and ultimately travel inside their feelings for the extreme connection. The researcher character in the book mentions that she has talked to psychologists and psychiatrists that together have treated 500.000 mentally ill patients, and common for them all is that they all mention a lack of connection. The researcher then mentions that the problem with today’s world is that we have maps of faraway galaxies but we don’t have a language that can describe our emotions. I beg to differ, I think this is exactly what NLP does, and you can read it in my blogs “What colour do you feel?”(by María Velasco), “Are you paying attention to the detail that can enhance your communications skills?” and “If you are feeling blue, go green”. It is all about our emotions and how we can use Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP ) to identify them and change them if we want to.
However, this book takes it a step further into the future where it is the inbound travelling that becomes the mystery as opposed to todays outbound travelling, with a technology that can break through human skin, which is described as the ultimate barrier between people, the packaging that holds our soul, so to speak. It does that to measure the connection between humans, which is always present. And of course this is not without its risks.
This literary scenario reminds me of the three perceptual positions of NLP, the first position that is the ego, the way I see things and in my opinion and my map of the world, awareness that not everyone shares your point of view. The second position is what they are using the machine for in the book: It is the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes, to become them to the degree that you can feel what they feel, and look at the world through their eyes. It takes some practice and it is possible. You can use it to get a better understanding of a given situation, to create rapport and even empathy; it also takes judgement out of the equation. You are using it when you feel emotional because someone else is emotional. The third position is the ability to stand away from a situation and see it through a third person’s eyes, the fly on the wall if you like. This can be used to become your own Coach and get the perspective from someone that is not involved. This also is possible and takes some practice.
All the positions are useful as you can gain a uniquely different experience and by learning to take different perceptual positions in a situation you can gain a broader picture and create a better balance and more options.
Lastly, there is a phrase in the book, which really caught my eye it is about breathing.
“We scream and breathe in when we are born and we die breathing out”. Breathing is something we expect to do automatically, we take for granted that we have enough breath to last us a lifetime. However, when we become conscious about our breathing and learn to use our breath we can use it not only to connect with ourselves as we do in mindfulness and meditation, you can also use your breath to connect with other people, which is what the book is about. So keep breathing everyone, it saves lives.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend and remember being kind is for free.
Best wishes
Ivalo